Wednesday, February 8, 2012

I am a believer, because the Holy Spirit woke me up. I came alive. Where before I had just been breathing, existing, sleepwalking, I really felt like I had been made new. But not just a feeling. I’m afraid because I’m an emotional person that this story, my story, might lose some weight. That wouldn’t be fair, because I had feelings before- a whole slew of them. It isn’t just that I was only sad before, and now, since being a Christian, I’m only happy. That would be a definite misrepresentation of the Christian life. It’s not only that my feelings are stronger now, that I feel sorrow more deeply and joy more profoundly, although for me, that has been true. I was broken then, and I am broken now, but with each passing year of my friendship with and worship of Jesus, I can see and feel restoration happening.

Scripture has worked in real and powerful ways in my life, and I’m not the woman I was four years ago. These have not been small changes, and they have not simply been the result of changing my way of life. It’s certainly not brainwashing, because there are still things that confuse and anger me about Christian culture. These are real, transformative changes about how I view everything. My worldview, the grid through which I not only make decisions, but see issues and people and relationships, has been flipped around. This isn’t about a habit I’ve broken, or about the many habits I’ve yet to break. Mary Holzer from four years ago would be completely and utterly confused at the choices I’ve made, the thoughts that pop up into my head on a daily basis, and the people I value. There is no other way for me to explain this. All I can promise is that the person I know best, myself, was incompetent to love others, and that now that person, by God’s grace, feels fueled to love others and love them well. I have very little explanation for why God chose to wake me from my somnambulism, but I have the deepest gratitude that he did.